All businesses encounter problems, delivery issues (why charge more to the Highlands – don’t get me started on that one!), stock issues, faulty or damaged goods, or as in the case of a recent transaction with Amazon, the order was lost completely.  Who’s fault is it?  Well I don’t really care to be honest I just want the goods that we ordered.  So I went onto the Amazon website, went to my orders, found the one that still had not arrived, pressed contact us, said they hadn’t arrived and within 5 minutes – yes you did read that right – I got a response from Amazon that wasn’t one of these ‘thank you for your enquiry we will deal with it when we manage to get round to it’ replies, it was in good English and it answered my question.  Now why, if a large and lets be honest enormous company like Amazon can manage good customer service, why can’t we all?

As a small business we pride ourselves on customer service, hate to think that a customer is let down by our lack of attention to detail or by not keeping them informed of anything, but our customer base is much more manageable than Amazon’s – so what makes them so different?  We have a list of complaints from Blackberry to Vodafone, Scottish Hydro Electric to Intuit Quickbooks and all of them are large multinational companies and all of them fail miserably to deal with customers the way we should be dealt with.

Not quite sure what I am going to do about it other than my usual rant on our blog, but I am interested to hear your good and bad customer service experiences so we know who to use in the future and who to avoid like the plague… our current avoidance recommendation is the Morrisons Petrol Station at Fort William – rude staff – and our current hero is obviously Amazon   Who are your heroes and villains in the customer service world?

Thanks to the 140 character width on Twitter I appreciate that you sometimes have to be a bit canny with the way you word things, but using sum instead of some just is not right and I am here to stand up for the English language!  I can almost (and I mean almost) put up with numbers being used instead of words i.e. 4-for or 2-to/too and 2B-to be or my personal favourite (not) m8-mate but to change words completely so that their meaning makes no sense just makes me shake my head in shame like a grown up adult – who’d have thought it?

So, what has driven me to a blog post like this today, well normally I wouldn’t name and shame, however, as the company in question this morning is a large well known and well respected company I thought I would actually say GLASGOW AIRPORT why oh why are you letting someone write public notices (Twitter posts) for you who clearly has a tenuous grip on the English language?  They are promoting your business and regardless of the fact that this is social media, this doesn’t mean that you can use teenage slang does it m8?  Oh and by the way Glasgow airport – the link to your Twitter profile from the home page of your website doesn’t work – just kind of makes everything even worse!

Text messages are predominantly personal, but a Twitter stream or Facebook page especially for large companies is out there in the public domain and I find it incomprehensible that work is not vetted prior to being published online?  Perhaps I just need to shut up and realise that this is the way things are going, but I hope not.

Don’t get me wrong, we have come back to overflowing in-boxes and more than one telephone message, but the to do list makes it all manageable but what I am really blogging about is that how just a little bit of communication really has made all the difference to our state of mind and our customer’s expectations.

Everyone needs a holiday, if you are to work effectively with renewed vigor it really is worth recharging those batteries, but as I have blogged before, being self employed doesn’t lend itself to holidays, especially not when you work with your other half!

So what did we do differently this time that enabled us to get away for such a long time?  We let our customers know when we would be away and what to do in an emergency – not that Internet marketing or SEO is ever life or death you understand!  How did we do this…. well I used Mailchimp to set up an above board, fully legal mail out to our address list.  I then added in subsections to our database and emailed out specific information to specific groups of customers informing them of what to do and who to contact if their website went down or their email stopped working.

And do you know what – no one had an emergency after all and by letting everyone know that we were out of the country and that we weren’t turning our mobiles on they didn’t get in touch even though they knew we were away.  Having had time off in the past when people still thought it acceptable to ring at 10pm on a Sunday night, these two weeks have been a revelation.

Having taken the time to work with Mailchimp and find out all the wonderful things it can do, we are going to be offering newsletter set up and management out to customers so do let us know if you are interested and when we are ready to offer a package we will be in touch.

So, now we are back from our travels (NYC and a wee cruise on the QM2) we are raring to go, fully recharged and extremely happy with our self serving customers

So, what do we do?  We call our friendly Vodafone helpline, who after 10 different button push choices tell us that we can’t speak to a human but we can use the online chat facility.  That’s fine, my typing speed is quick and my Internet connection for the minute seems stable enough to cope.  I explain our problem to 1st chat representative and ask if we can change our contract onto iPhones, you know send our BB’s back to them, stay on the same enormous tariff that we don’t use all of the minutes, texts or data usage for anyway, so they are still making money out of us – I am kind of thinking this is sounding quite familiar to many of you.  Oh and did I mention that we have been with Vodfone for probably 12 years, loyal service blah blah blah.

Well, 1st Vodafone chat representative said there was no way we could get out of our current contract, nor could it be downgraded, but don’t worry, we could purchase new phones from Vodafone and they will change the tariff over from Blackberry to iPhone.  Job done…  ‘I will transfer this chat to our sales team’…. ok.  2nd Vodafone chat representative joins the conversation and I have to give him 15 minutes to read through previous chat and that he will get back to me.  15 minutes later and his first question is ‘so you would like to buy an iPhone’.  This is going great, yes is my answer and we will sell back our Blackberries to Vodafone in order to help pay for them.  Silly silly me – what was I thinking?  This now leads to a full discussion and a repetition of everything I have already typed and he has supposedly read, and for him to keep telling me not to sell our phones because did we know we were in a contract?  Did we also know that we can’t upgrade until next November?  Not sure I have ever experience online chat rage before, but I have now!

So to cut a very long story short, we are now left with two options, pay £500 each to have a new iPhone – not going to happen, or stick with our current over priced contract of which we only use half of the allocated service using phones that are now deemed unreliable and work only when they feel like it.  And before I get inundated with the comments such as ‘good old Blackberry giving Steve Jobs a fitting send off’ or ‘you should have got an iPhone in the first place’ I am genuinely interested to hear if other people have had similar problems and what you did to resolve them?

I will be sad to see my Blackberry go, but what is the point in having a work tool that isn’t reliable?  Not even sure if I am convinced I want an iPhone and perhaps HTC is the way forward, but right now, we are stuck in a rut with Vodafone refusing to budge an inch….

Answers and suggestions on a BBM…

However, it seems recently that there have been so many glitches with Facebook that it is starting to drive me slightly mad!  Having watched The Social Network over the weekend for the second time (we even went to the pictures to see this one) there was one scene in the film where the founder of Facebook was making the point that it must and will never go offline.  He’s quite right, I cant remember the site ever being offline, but he neglected to say ‘but it might go wrong now and again’.

I have found one helpful hint to stop Facebook messing with your head is to insert the word beta into the url i.e. http://www.beta.facebook.com as this seems to make the majority of issues resolve themselves, however, just recently I am struggling on a daily basis with making apps work with my pages.  This is not an issue I have with my personal profile it is just business pages, and due to the nature of our work, I am admin on an ever growing list of pages and when I find something new, useful and just damn good obviously I want to add this new service to all pages applicable.  So why does Facebook make it so difficult?!   I am kind of thinking it is because Facebook was never meant to be for business use and so has not upgraded this side of their business as well as the personal side of it.

As ever, interested to hear other people’s experiences – answers on a Facebook post please

So, the dilemma is:  what do you do when your customers don’t pay on time even though you have had discussions, you have agreed a way of working out the payments and then all of a sudden they stop taking your calls or not responding to emails?

Well, in the past this was the situation we were in and we naively thought that the customer in question would clear his debt and all would be well again.  How silly were we?  He ended up leaving us, still owing us a considerable amount of money, was verbally threatening on email and telephone and was so horrid that we ended up giving him the information he required to set up his website with someone else just to get rid of him.  That was a year ago and to this day we have still not received the money even after spending more money asking a debt collection company to get involved.

So, you can imagine how awkward we now feel when we find ourselves in a similar situation with two more customers.  Long standing customers, one of them is relatively local, and we are in the position where if we take the websites down we are effectively cutting off one of the major streams of income to their businesses.  Whilst this pains us and makes us feel uncomfortable, from a business point of view we are in the position of if we take their website offline then we are almost guaranteeing that the relationship is now beyond repair and we are probably going to lose their business.

Well, we had to toughen up, one website went offline yesterday – and amazingly enough the customer has got in touch – the other website is due to go offline tomorrow – we will see what happens then.  In the grand scheme of things, it is not cost effective having to spend time chasing payments so what do you do as a small business owner who doesn’t like to upset people?

I don’t know the answer!  As always, keen to find out how you deal with this situation because I am sure we are not the only ones.

So, what is my moan about today?  Well it’s about the lack of care people/businesses take to spelling these days.  I received a request today asking if we would be interested in linking to a blog – I am all for link building where appropriate but to be honest the subject of this blog probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for our website, however, the thing that put me off was that there were 6, yes I said 6, spelling mistakes within the first paragraph of the most recent blog post! (since writing this post I have contacted Skippy the blog writer and he has very graciously allowed me to link to his blog – I am sure the mistakes will be corrected by now though!)

I am aware that we all shorten words on Twitter, Facebook and other similar forms of quick communication – to see texts from my 60+ dad that don’t include any vowels is a joy in itself – but surely if you are creating web copy or blog posts then you have the freedom to revert back to normality and structure sentences properly and use correct spelling.  Or am I alone in this thinking?

Now before you trawl through our web copy or previous blog posts to find a glaring error, I am not for a minute saying we are perfect in any way, but I do use spell check and I do proof read things and I would suggest that the likelihood of finding 6 spelling mistakes within 2 sentences is minimal but I am, as ever, curious to hear people’s opinions on this because I would hate to think I have become old fashioned in my views!

Comments in the Queen’s English gladly received…… that’s i before e except after c, just in case you were wondering!

However, the same can not be said about many people we meet.  Don’t get me wrong, many have embraced Twitter along with Facebook and actively get involved, but you know, after the last week’s worth of tweets from ‘some’ people we have been following, it really is no wonder people don’t get Twitter.

Scenario….. as most of you are aware we live in beautiful Scotland and for the past week or so have been living in a golfers paradise thanks to the golf up at Castle Stuart, which, let me be clear whilst it’s not a million miles away it most definitely is not on our immediate door step and as a neighbour showed us yesterday in order to be there for the golf he had to leave here at 6.30am on a Sunday morning!  However, if you had been watching our Twitter stream you would be excused from thinking we live and work next door to Castle Stuart and actually its not the golf that people have been here for it has been for the wonderful shopping, accommodation, lunches and dinners that they can have #castlestuart #golfopen #golfspecial !

Before I go off into rant mode, I personally don’t have an issue with hanging onto the marketing coat tales of a big event.  What I do have an issue with is blatant advertising made to look like it is a public service, somehow it just seems wrong to me.  In our eyes ramming sales messages down our twitter stream throat is a sure way to make us unfollow.  It also makes us more aware of why people don’t get Twitter.

So we’re asking please…. remember the old example : would you stand in a room full of people you don’t know and without any prompting start shouting out a sales message?  The answer hopefully is no!

In our case there are only 2 of us ‘in the office’  although as you know we work with many other companies, but in the grand scheme of things we can discuss an idea and pretty much put it into practice the next day – complete flexibility!

As Barry mentioned in his comment, us Brits are known for being a bit ‘tight’ sometimes especially when it comes to paying for something that we can’t touch i.e. SEO or Internet marketing.  So we decided to change the way we work.  The upshot of this is we are keeping our customers longer, they are actually spending more money with us, they are definitely recommending our services more and they are enjoying the freedom of complete flexibility.   So what do we now offer:

• different types of packages for smaller businesses
• no annual contract unless specifically asked for
• flexibility to ‘dip in and out of our services’ whenever the customer wishes
• a transparent pricing policy – ongoing work is ‘by the hour’ rather than a contract figure per month

Obviously there are limitations to our flexibility and quite often there has to be a compromise e.g. if we recommend a project requires 16 hours per month for 3 months to achieve the customer’s requirements and they only want to spend 8 hours for 2 months the reality is this will have a direct impact on our ability to produce the desired results – as long as the customer is aware of these consequences then there is no problem.  The absolute key to our business is absolute transparancey and ultimately an amount of flexibility that will ensure the customer is happy with the level of service for the price they are paying.

And, when Barry asked if we ‘stick to our guns’ regarding not lowering our price just to get a sale – then answer is absolutely yes.  There is no point in making a sale if it is going to harm the profitability of your business.  Who wants to work for free unless you are a dedicated volunteer?

Don’t worry, I am not going to go off on a rant again, its just that I am getting so disheartened with people thinking that we should be cheaper for the work we carry out… actually that’s unfair, the majority of people are aware that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, or in our case if you pay proper fees then you get professional service.

In our ever evolving company, we often discuss well into the night the direction we want to take our business and many moons ago we made the decision not to ‘sell our soul to the devil’ or to be more precise – sell ourselves short.  No more would we try and fit in with a customer who says things like ‘what could you do for £20 a month’… the answer now is ‘nothing’!

So why the blog post?  Well as ever I just wanted to share with you the thought process behind our small business, and to hopefully give down to earth honest advice to other start up and small businesses.  If you know you are worth the money and you work hard for that money (cue Donna Summer!) then don’t undervalue yourself or your product.  By all means negotiate and even barter if it is appropriate, but in our experience the customers that paid the smallest amount usually demanded the highest quantity of our time and therefore we ultimately lost money.

As ever, your thoughts, suggestions or just comments are always welcome.